1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure relates primarily to image detection and, more specifically, to detecting near-duplicate images in printed material.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
As is known to those skilled in the art, detection of duplicate, or near-duplicate, images in a large database requires finding a robust interest point and extracting the visual features surrounding that interest point. Consequently, significant effort has been expended on interest point detection and feature extraction. However, it remains a significant challenge to detect images that have been scaled in size or otherwise modified from the original image.
Present algorithms for identifying matching images in a database to the modified image require an undesirably long search time that may grow significantly as the size of the database increases. Thus, it would be desirable to provide an method of rapidly and reliably detecting duplicate, or near-duplicate, images that have been modified by, for example, re-encoding, printing, scanning, resizing, or otherwise resealing the image.